Young Playwrights Festival lit up the dark days last week

City Theatre's Young Playwrights Festival (last week) is one of Pittsburgh's signature theater programs, forming with the CLO's Gene Kelly Awards and the Public Theater's Shakespeare Monologue Contest an annual trio that encourage the creativity of middle and high school students. In other words, they aren't just competitions, though there are awards along the way.

All three also have a high pleasure quotient -- both for the students, I assume, interlaced with whatever frustration and growing pains are involved in taking creative risks, and for us, in the watching. And all three provide some of the more heartfelt theater evenings of the year, every year.

With City's YPWF, there's competition only in that the six plays showcased were selected from 175 scripts submitted, all part of a process involving workshops and development with guest dramaturgs. The result is usually two separate, simply staged performances, one for high school plays, one for middle school. But this year those programs were restricted to readings, to make room for a third, in which YPWF alumni playwrights were invited to return with new scripts. Those were the plays that got the full performances -- more about them tomorrow.

In addition, there were all sorts of student workshops and discussions, all under the direction of City's enthusiastic new director of education. Kristen Link.

Middle School Plays

Middle school plays often feature a sweet unselfconsciousness, and this year's trio was no exception. "Picture Day" by Emily Valley (Keystone Oaks MS) is a parable about a girl obsessed with appearance to the point of neglecting and even hurting her friends. "Appreciation" by Kelsey Miller (Rogers CAPA) is a programmatic piece about a couple of girls who take a "Twilight Zone" trip back in time to discover that the Hill District was once a vibrant city within a city. Both end with obvious lessons learned.

But I was most taken with "Prove Him Wrong" by Ellen McCague (Rogers CAPA), a drama about a laid-off worker who finally learns to talk to his wife and express the dreams he's kept hidden under a macho disguise and ask her help to realize them. But as she points out, he hasn't become so sensitized that he's willing to extend her the same freedom. The play poses more questions than it settles, not a bad thing to do.

High School Plays

The selfconsciousness that sometimes shows up in high school plays comes from the natural attempt to reach farther, often by imitating ambitious models. But I didn't feel much of that this year, as all three plays showed an independent sense of self.

"Brother Have I Loved" by Leah Friedman (CAPA) is set in an unusual tea leaves-reading shop where you can cancel emotional pain by renouncing the ability to feel. A wounded young man meets the eccentric proprietor and an irritating young kid who steals people's mail in search of emotion missing in his life. It's an ambitious parable, even though there's no surprise that the young man ultimately chooses to keep his pain, realizing that it's the necessary dark side of love.

"Eight Poems About Perry" by Sarah Rogers (Woodland Hills HS, now at Fordham) is about a young man's cloying manuscript, "Letters from the Heart." His effusions are pretty banal, and his self-conceit about them is off-putting. But how should his friend respond to this bad art? The play is really about the dimensions and responsibilities of friendship.

The crowd pleaser of the trio was "Sense and Senselessness" by Eli Diamond (Peters HS, now at CMU), a series of vignettes about the eccentric clients in a psychologist's office. The most ambitious and entertaining twist was a sort of deus ex machina, a conceited dancer who enters whenever the psychologist is at her wit's end to confound the difficult client. Played by the outrageously funny Doug Mertz, this self-confessed god of beauty turns out also to be a Rensaissance man, as he shows with an impromptu concert.

Both sets of plays were directed by City's associate artistic director, Stuart Carden, most of whose work (and not just because there was a short rehearsal period) had to go into working with the young playwrights. He knows that the chief job is to give the play a hearing, to make the playwright the primary focus. City provided a capable and varied (half black, half white) acting ensemble of 10, mainly Point Park and CMU acting students but led by the more mature Mertz, Bridget Connors and Garbie Dukes. Kudos to them all for their energy and spirit.

More to come.